NASHVILLE'S UNWRITTEN RULES: INSIDE THE BUSINESS OF COUNTRY MUSIC

NASHVILLE'S UNWRITTEN RULES: INSIDE THE BUSINESS OF COUNTRY MUSIC Dan Daley (Overlook, $27.95) Books about the business side of country music are nothing new, but journalist and songwriter Daley sets down the feudal structure and the cultural oddities that separate the Nashville way of doing business from the norm in New York and L.A. He may glorify the importance of a system that allows producers to become record-label heads, but he's dead-on about two of the ''unwritten'' imperatives: If you want to be a star, you dang well better expect to run up against a host of soft-sided kickbacks (i.e., producers insisting their acts record the songs they control), and if you want to cover the industry from its home base, expect to become a Nashville ''cheerleader,'' cutting the celebrities more slack than their counterparts in other forms of entertainment would dream of. B